Record collecting is a trip with no destination,
just a plethora of highly satisfying layovers. The minute you finally find
that one album you’ve been coveting forever, you’re already dreaming
of another distant, elusive prize. You spend a chunk of time marinating in
a specific genre, niche or artist, only to be swayed by new genres and sub-genres,
forever greener pastures. It’s a happy, gypsy-like existence. Taking
each night’s pleasure from the discovery of the day.

But every collector has a center of gravity,
an anchor buried deep in the tempest of his archive, the calm spiritual eye
of the storm of his restless mind. I’m talking about that niche or style
or artist that rings a bell deep inside. The music you are always trying to
find when you are finding other cool things. The music you would keep if otherwise
forced to sell off every album you own. They’re not necessarily the
rarest or the coolest records, or even the ones you paid the most money for
or play most frequently for visitors. It is simply the music you will hunt
down forever, until you have everything. The music you debate buying as a
second or third or fourth copy because it's in slightly better condition
than the one you have, or you want to gift it to friends (who don’t
have turntables)… It’s not just the reason you started collecting,
it’s the reason you still do.

For me, this compulsive, completist obsession
begins and ends with jazz guitartist Gabor Szabo. There are many reasons why.
He was a tragic, compelling individual who died too young (46); he was a mystical,
indulgent, frustrating artist whose incredible beauty was offset by demons
of his own making (heroin, Scientology, Ferraris). He loved California (he
lived in the L.A. hills above the Strip; recorded and toured up and down the
West Coast extensively, and played with a roster full of L.A.’s premier
rock, jazz and pop session musicians.)

His music is incredibly diverse and evolving,
but always defined by a mythical-romantic Gypsy strain, a haunting, indelible
echo of the lost past of his native Budapest. Gabor Szabo taught himself guitar
at 15 and managed to flee Communist Hungary in the nick of time, settling
in the U.S. in the late Fifties. He attended the Berklee School of Music,
making close friendships with Sixties jazz notables Gary McFarland and Cal
Tjader. He apprenticed on the East Coast, playing guitar for Chico Hamilton
and then Charles Lloyd, before re-locating to the West Coast and establishing
a notable solo career on Impulse through the early-mid Sixties. He was something
of an anomaly at the label, and to this day his contribution is inadequately
recollected at “The House that ‘Trane Built.”

In a quiet, unassuming way, he was a jazz revolutionary,
and the perfect voice to carry American jazz into the rock atmosphere of the
Sixties. He was one of the very first to bring contemporary rock songs of
the era (what he referred to as “pop-rock”) into the jazz canon.
When others were happy to trot out the 1,587th version of “My Funny
Valentine,” Gabor was embracing Donovan, the Animals, Jefferson Airplane,
and especially George Harrison (who had a profound effect on Gabor’s
direction, if not his exemplary style). Beginning with Spellbinder
in 1966 (which many rate his best album) and continuing through Simpatico
(an interesting pairing with Gary McFarland), The Sorcerer, More Sorcery,
the pre-psychedelic, Indian instrument-infused classic, Jazz Raga
(in which Gabor’s overdubbed out-of-tune sitar playing is famously sampled
by the Dust Brothers and Beck on Odelay), to Wind, Sky and Diamonds,
a strange time-capsule of an album that pits Gabor’s playing side by
side with an innocuous vocal harmony group called the California Dreamers;
Gabor Szabo carved out a successful career and became a jazz sensation.

In the late Sixties, he left Impulse and started
Skye Records with his friends McFarland and Tjader, and produced in succession
three of his most compelling, vital and uncompromising albums: Bacchanal,
Dreams, and Gabor Szabo 1969, before the label’s unfortunate demise.
Of these, Dreams in the most unique, and the hardest to find. It
is an inspired work of artistic vision and consummate, exacting technical
skill, from the exquisite cover art (a monochromatic engraving of mythological
themes in the style of Aubrey Beardsley or Gustave Dore) to the fine arrangements
by Gary McFarland that provide a full, dreamy orchestral sweep without being
intrusive or overwhelming, to the incredible lacy interplay between Gabor’s
impassioned, enigmatic solos and guitartist Jimmy Stewart’s delicate,
trellis-like rhythms. Dreams is an overlooked masterwork by an underappreciated
master.

In some ways, Dreams is the moonlight
equivalent of Miles Davis’ aloof, sun-drenched Sketches of Spain
(minus the trumpet). Dreams is dreamy, in a crystalline, spider-web
way, full complexity and finely etched illusions. But it is also very warm
and captures distinctly what Gabor himself termed, in a Down Beat
Magazine “blindfold test” from 1975, an “emotional message,”
that is simultaneously personal, passionate, and otherworldly.

The record begins with a Szabo original, “Galatea’s
Guitar,” an album standout that immediately sets an erotic tone with
a percussive crack, followed by a hissing guitar line that is either the first
fluttering gaze of the sleeping snake or the ready en garde of the
charmer. In fact, it is the dance of both snake and charmer, locked in a smoldering,
willful battle of sound, movement and glance. The sultry groove builds slowly,
steadily to its climax, with cymbals suddenly crashing, guitars going haywire,
organ vamping like a foot stomping a blaze, and the snake revealed to be the
Kundalini Serpent, flying on wings beyond the physical realm into the spiritual
chaos. It all ends abruptly, with a last repetition of the melody fading out,
the musical equivalent of a lit cigarette and a well-earned first drag.

“Half the Day is Night” is an achingly
beautiful ballad, written by McFarland, which serves as a perfect example
of the magical connection between Gabor and accompanist Jimmy Stewart. Stewart
lays down the setting, the room, the burning candles, the dusk outside the
windows, while Gabor is the pure melancholy feeling of the lonely soul inside,
pouring out his heart to the moon, until dawn comes bringing a repetition
of the opening all over again.

The album winds on in an uninterrupted spell,
a waking dream that weaves a tapestry varied, but of a piece, broken only
by the distinct up tempo Hungarian folk flavorings at the end “The Fortune
Teller” (Javol!). But Dreams ends on a dazzling high point:
a cover of the Donovan song, “Ferris Wheel,” that brings us back
to earth and takes us on a new journey altogether. I’ve never heard
Donovan’s original, and I don’t ever want to. This is the only
version for me, with the quintet setting up the mechanism, the recurring melody
like a gear patiently turning in an old-fashioned, eternal machine, as Gabor’s
solo guitar lines rise up and down in a circle of wisdom, grabbing at the
stars, falling, then reaching over to pluck a flower from the grass below.
It becomes a melodic mantra, one that seems to have begun before this album
was recorded and will go on forever in the world and in your soul once you’ve
committed it. I first heard “Ferris Wheel” on the day I held my
sister’s hand as she delivered her third child. Two years to the day
after we sat together in a hospital room watching our father die. This song
was in my heart then, before I’d heard it. And it stays in my heart
now, and for all times to come.

That is the beauty of Gabor. He has an ability
to reach beyond musical structures and compositions and melodies and formats
to touch something ancient, timeless and essential. It's the vibration to
which our collective souls are tuned. He reached it, moved in time and harmony
with it, and the pain of that deep beauty probably killed him. But he’s
left his clues for us, the gift of a life’s effort. It’s criminal
that so little of his work has been re-released for mass consumption, but
that's part of the meaning of it. You have to make your own effort, not a
big one really, to go out and seek his teaching. The message is there in the
music, but not always is the music. Even late in his career, when
he was putting it down for the money (and the heroin habit), surrounding himself
with cheesy disco environments (Bunny Sigler) and over the top production
(Bob James) his solos seem to operate on a separate plane, a mercurial whisper
of truth practically lost in a artificial, commercial soundscapes. May that
whisper continue to be heard.

For a DETAILED BIOGRAPHY/DISCOGRAPHY of Gabor
Szabo’s legacy, check out Doug Payne’s comprehensive site Gabor
Szabo ICONOCLASM. He’s put in a ton of work and deserves to be thanked…
Thanks, Doug!

On a final note, my own "magical connection"
to Gabor Szabo began in one of those seemingly random ways in which destiny
always arrives. A week before my dad was diagnosed with cancer I "accidentally"
downloaded three Szabo tracks while looking for someone else's music. I'd
never heard of him. I put those tracks on my Ipod and listened to them nonstop
on my flight back to Tennessee. They provided the theme to a scary and uncertain
future. I went to my hometown record store, Chad's, to find his stuff on vinyl
and bought two of his records on the spot. (You can find them; they're around.)
Nearly five years later, I'm still looking... Wanna know which tracks were
on my Ipod? (Hint-- click above.)